Danny Esquenazi

Danny Esquenazi (Bogota, Colombia, 1975) has updated geometric abstraction with works that bring together quite diverse elements: the playful pleasure of the child who puts together an erector set into infinite shapes; the expertise of a medieval craftsman to transmute wood into an unheard of form; the compositional and perceptual study and understanding of kineticism and of visual art; and the ability to convert a timeless fascination with the world’s color into hybrid works – from three dimensional painting to abstract sculptures – constructed with mathematical precision.

As art critic Eduardo Serrano has said, Esquenazi’s work shows that “sculpture, as a three-dimensional plastic statement, is not extinct but rather continues to offer both creative and expressive opportunities with stimulating consequences and forceful achievements.” Esquenazi combines his architectural and industrial design studies with a fantastic sense of freedom and imaginative play. In fact, one of his series is precisely entitled Cinetismo lúdico (Playful Kineticsm). Esquenazi transfers the learning of previous generations regarding the experience of color to an underlying layer such as wood, and extends the possibility of perceptual surprises, thus multiplying his geometric shapes. He uses thin bars ending in circular shapes of varying diameters, winding or straight slats that define abstract landscapes of unusual volumes, and countless flat squares or perfect cubes. He designs vast number of forms on which he blends colors and shadows so that the hue scales or the gradation games excite the eye to the point of fostering new sensations of movement, not only visual but emotional as well.

Esquenazi, who never wears black and has a multi-color couch at home, believes in the power of the spectrum of melded light over affective mobility. He has never created a work in black and white nor can he imagine himself ever doing a monochrome piece. Instead, for him, each series instills in him a new definition in the use of color. In “Tributo a la naturaleza” (Tribute to Nature) the addition of color was controlled in precise, minute measures in order to create, strip by strip, the kind of almost imperceptible transitions that transform the horizon at dawn and at dusk until the sudden and surprising arrival of night or of day. In turn, in the series “Impulsos cromáticos” (Chromatic Impulses), wooden cubes can freely combine multiple colors without being subject to subtle gradations from one hue to another. In all cases, the structures constitute a work of engineering and a challenge to the imagination: there are three-dimensional pieces contained within the frame of the piece but without a background; there are monochrome grids against the background of a burst of color in transition; there are pieces in which the volume scales have a correspondence with specific gradations, and works with strips that make reference, as in the work of Carlos Rojas, to the sight of the horizon on some landscape.

The multiplication of the combinatorial games of colors and shapes would not be possible without the fantastic carpentry workshop where Esquenazi hoards tools that complete the basic process that goes from the basic and three-dimensional sketch on paper, to the computer aided design, to the work on multiple kinds of wood: from veneers to blocks to particleboards, without excluding woods from the synthetic world. His tools are literally the means to carry, as far as possible, the combined elements of a work which is structured upon the dynamic play of ideas in color.